NaNo Days 21 to 29: Winner!

I made it! It took a couple of long evenings writing, but I pulled it off!
Dire measurements were need, though, as the stats page indicated I would not make it if I kept up the pace I had on the 20th. So I set myself the goal of writing at least 2,000 words every day I could write, and writing at least 3,000 days on the weekends. This led to even more crazy roller coaster graphs:

If you count properly, I reached 50k in 20 days rather than 30. I can't remember ever having so few days to actually write on in November, but I didn't realise that it really was only 20 days until I finished this evening. Wow, that makes the result slightly more impressive...

One of the things that saved this NaNo was the World Cup. I like writing with something happening in the background, a sort of constant white noise, as long as it doesn't demand too much of my attention. Football for me is just the thing. I don't really care about the outcome, but it gives me a nice point to rest my eyes on whenever I need to think of where to move the story next.

Not that I had a lot of those moments with this NaNo story. I had planned out the main story points in advance, with all the characters I needed to make the whole come together. About two thirds through I feared I needed another character to flesh everything out enough, but I managed to get there in the end. Just, I might add; I finished at 50,018 words; perhaps the narrowest marging I have ever had over the 50k. But I was so done with writing at this point... Getting 1,667 words in every day is pretty doable, but putting in at least 2,000 whenever you write, with some days getting close to 5,000 words just to catch up again, is like doing small sprints during a marathon; exhausting.

But I made it! And I pretty much like my story! There were some inspired sentences in there, when I felt like was really in the writing flow. There were also some bits where I was just stringing words together, pretty sure I was already done with the topic, pretty sure nothing was gained from saying basically the same thing in yet another slightly different way, but as always with NaNoWriMo, it's not about the quality, it's about the quantity. 

And I got there in the end, even in just 20 days.

NaNo Days 10 to 20: The only way is up

I'm still writing! I just haven't been writing about the writing. But the NaNo'ing is still happening.

Somehow this November has work-wise turned out to be one of the busiest months in a while, which means that I can't find the time to write every day. This has led to more of the roller coaster behaviour on my daily written amount graph:

Yup, those are two days of not writing at all, followed by two days of pretty frantic writing to get back to par. There is also another write-in in there somewhere, where most of my writing group have already achieved 50k or are at least above 40k, whereas I was the one barely making it to the halfway point of 25k during that meeting. They applauded politely. We are group with team spirit.

But, today, for the first time this NaNo year, I managed to get my total word count above the par graph:

I'm at 34k words currently, the par is at a nice round 33,333 today. So not a very big margin. And I expect more work related things in the evenings for the coming week, so keeping up the high numbers might prove difficult still.

So it is hard to find the time to write. But when I do have that, the writing itself still flows easily. I have to struggle with the English vocab sometimes, and I think I am in dire need of adding another character before the story comes to an end, or I'll be left short before the finish line, but all in all the writing itself isn't the problem. If I'd had all the time of the world on my hands, I'd probably have reached the 50k by now.

So that's the good news. The outlook is optimistic, let's see how far I'll get in the final 10 days.

NaNo Days 1 to 9: rollercoaster time!

NaNoWriMo started nine days ago, which means I should be at 15k words if I were writing on par. As of yesterday, I am at a little over 10k. I haven't written today yet, so the number will be closer to the 15 at the end of today. But I thought doing the blog first and the NaNo after meant the blog would actually happen today.
So this year's NaNo has had a bit of a rollercoaster start. There were some days, including November 1st, when I didn't write at all. Then there were some days when I poured out 3k. My average word count per day is somewhere around 1,111 which is a nice number but not the greatest if par is set at 1,667. All of this is reflected in the nice daily word count graph NaNo provides me with:

Yup, pretty big ups and downs.

But when I write, it is easy. I like my story, I like my characters, I can rant on about customer service for 2k words without feeling like I should really be doing something better with my typing. So the NaNo vibe of just pouring out the words and see where they'll get you is happening. I just didn't have the time or space to make it happen every day of November so far.

Given what I've planned for the rest of November, I'm pretty sure this vibe will continue for the weeks to come. As long as there are a couple of really good days where I can put down 3 or 5k, I should be able to make it in the end.